Diaries of Women in Captivity. The Internment of German and Austrian Civilians during the First World War as Depicted in the Testimonies of Gertrud Köbner, Helene Schaarschmidt and Helene Fürnkranz

During the First World War, France, likeother combatant parties, interned civilian populations from countries with which it was at war. One of these French internment camps was the Convent of Garaison (Hautes-Pyrénées), intended specifically to accommodate families, women, and children. From 1915 on, after their repatriation to Germany or Switzerland, three women who were interned at Garaison (two Germans, Gertrud Köbner and Helene Schaarschmidt, and an Austrian, Helene Fürnkranz) published their own testimonies of this experience in diary form, thus offering the historian an extraordinary documentary source. This article presents a comparative analysis of these three texts and examines the characteristics of the diary genre, its construction, the value of this type of document and the specificities of the wartime diary, especially as kept by women.